Category: Cocktails

I contributed the “Cocktail of the Week” feature for Distiller this week. There being some sort of big football game today, they asked me to write up something involved beer. I went with one of the recipes featured in my book, Erick Castro’s Abbey Street Punch from Polite Provisions in San Diego, California. This is a great one for winter parties, combining Irish whiskey, Jamaican rum, allspice dram, and stout. Click over for the recipe and some historical notes on using ale in punch.

Earlier this year, my friend David L. Reamer (photographer of my book Cocktails on Tap) recruited me for a collaboration with Union Wine. The project: Create a collection of cocktails with Union Wine’s popular Underwood Rosé to be published by Scout Books. It’s finally come together with illustrations by The Ellaphant in the Room, and it looks great. My fellow Portland bartenders Mindy Kucan (Hale Pele), Lauren Scott (Angel Face), Douglas Derrick (Ava Gene’s), and Ansel Vickery (Free House), along with Maitland Finley from Union Wine, all contributed recipes.

Photo by David L. Reamer.

My first contribution (above) is the Pink Peruvian, which was an opportunity to mix with Encanto Pisco’s new Barkeep’s Whimsy, a pisco created by a team of bartenders on a visit to Encanto’s distillery in Peru. The grape blend essentially inverts their popular Grand & Noble pisco, leading with Torentel grapes backed by Quebranta, Moscatel, Mollar and Italia. It’s beautifully floral and aromatic, perfect for light and complex summer cocktails.

“I sure am glad I had this old bottle of Frangelico lying around,” is not a sentence I expected to be saying to myself this week. But when working on unusual cocktail assignments, sometimes those neglected dusty bottles can come in handy.

Tonight is Portland’s annual Rye Beer Fest, a celebration of rye beers taking place during PDX Beer Week, and this year the festival is extending into rye whiskeys as well. As part of that expanded focus, founder Kerry Finsand invited me to create a beer cocktail for the festival using George Dickel rye whiskey and the official beer of the fest, a collaboration with Back Pedal Brewing in the Pearl District.

The beer we came up with is Oatmeal Ryesin Cookie. Back Pedal’s idea was to create an ale made to “conjure up childhood memories of a fresh baked cookie.” The mash combines English malts, rye, and toasted oats, and it’s fermented with aromatic saison yeasts. The beer is cold conditioned on Flame raisins and an addition of Tongan and Madagascar vanilla beans. At 33 IBU and 7.8% abv, it’s a lightly hopped, smooth, malty ale.

Taking a growler pulled fresh from the conditioning tank, my main goal in making a beer cocktail with it was to keep highlighting those raisin cookie notes. That’s where the hazelnut liqueur Frangelico came in handy. After one try at a Flip that was actually pretty good, I decided an ale punch in the old English social tradition was the way to go. The maltiness of Back Pedal’s beer is perfect for this. (And it’s a lot less work for me than shaking Flips all night.)

I’ll be serving this Oatmeal Ryesin Punch tonight at the Rye Beer Fest from 7:00-9:00 pm at Eastburn in Portland, Oregon (where I’ll be selling signed copies of my beer cocktail book as well). Given the rarity of the beer, this is probably the only time the punch will be served. But for the sake of completeness, here’s a recipe that could be used as a template.

Make an oleo-saccharum of the lemon peel and sugar in a punch bowl, muddling the peels to extract the oil. Add the water and lemon juice and stir until the sugar is fully dissolved. Pour in the remaining ingredients and grate fresh cinnamon over the surface of the punch. Slip a large ice block into the bowl, or ladle into individual glasses over large cubes.

The fourth annual Aquavit Week celebration is now in full swing, which is the kind of thing I would have blogged about if keeping this blog updated in a timely manner was still a priority. The site is still good for posting cocktail recipes though, and I have two new aquavit drinks for you today. There’s also still time to catch Aquavit Week cocktails at more than forty bars and restaurants, and to attend our closing party in Portland at La Moule on Saturday night.

The first cocktail, which we’ll be serving at La Moule, is the Ringlefinch, a wintry sour that uses a new aquavit barrel aged tea from local teamaker Steven Smith. For this holiday release black tea was aged in a Krogstad aquavit barrel and flavored with mulling spices, cranberries, and roasted hazelnuts. The tea is wonderful on its own. For the cocktail, I’ve used it in a strong tea syrup. The drink is loosely inspired by Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Norwegian Wood, but taken in a citrusy direction.

Bring the water just off the boil and steep the tea in it for about four minutes. Strain and combine with one cup sugar to make a syrup.

The next drink is a punch I created for Portland Monthly’s December magazine feature on Scandinavian cooking. It gets its festive color from hibiscus tea (Steven Smith once again makes a great choice here). For the aquavit, go with a crisp, unaged spirit. I’ve made this with both Brennivin from Iceland and Skadi from Montana with great results.

Bring the water just off a boil and steep the hibiscus tea in it for about five minutes. Remove the sachets (or strain if using loose leaf) and stir in the honey until dissolved. Allow the mixture to chill. Combine remaining ingredients in a punch bowl right before service, slip in a large ice block, and ladle into punch glasses.

It’s not unusual for a new cocktail book to come out. These days, it’s not even unusual for a very good cocktail book to be published. But a new book that I’ll not only use regularly in my own home, but also unhesitatingly recommend to friends who don’t make their living in the drinks industry? That’s a rarity. Paul Clarke’s newly released The Cocktail Chronicles is that book.

If you’ve followed this blog for a long time, you might remember Paul from Mixology Monday, the monthly “cocktail party” he initiated years ago to inspire creativity and exploration within the community of cocktail bloggers. Paul was one of the first to make a go of cocktail blogging, launching The Cocktail Chronicles blog in 2005. (My own site launched in 2003 — take that, Paul! — but he beat me to blogging about mixing drinks.) The cocktail world was a much smaller place back then, and a lot of the writers in it were brought together by these monthly blog round ups. (Looking back, some of the drinks from those days should stay in the past. I believe my first MxMo contribution was a combination of Scotch, amaretto, and cigar-infused whipped cream, which I don’t think I’ll be reviving any time soon.)

As Paul notes in his new book, few of those early blogs rarely, if ever, update anymore, though some of the writers have moved on to bigger things. Blogging itself has declined in importance. Or depending on how you look at it, blogging is more important than ever, having infused itself into mainstream journalism and popular social media. We’re all bloggers now. But at a minimum, blogging has lost its cachet as a distinct medium and the esprit de corps that united the people that wrote in it.

The publication of The Cocktail Chronicles seems like an apt occasion to revisit some of the traditions of the early days of cocktail blogging. I’m going to indulge in three of them: Participating in Mixology Monday, getting excited about a new spirit, and writing very much past deadline.

This month’s Mixology Monday (which was actually last Monday), is hosted by current MxMo chairman Fred Yarm. For the momentous occasion of MxMo C, the 100th edition, the theme is “Cocktail Chronicles, a fitting tribute to the guy who started it all:

But what does Mixology Monday “Cocktail Chronicles” mean? I figured that we should look to Paul’s magnum opus and digest the theme of it all — what is timeless (or potentially timeless) and elegant in its simplicity. Paul commented in his interview, “[it]’s wonderful to see that level of creativity but simplicity is going to be the glue that continues to hold interest in the cocktail together. The moment that we make cocktails too difficult or too inaccessible to the average guest, the average consumer, then we start losing people.” Paul does support a minor tweak of a major classic as well as dusting off a lesser known vintage recipe like the Creole Contentment; in addition, proto-classics like the Chartreuse Swizzle and the Penicillin intrigue him for their potential to be remembered twenty years from now. Moreover, he is a big fan of the story when there is one whether about a somewhat novel ingredient like a quinquina, the bartender making it, or the history behind a cocktail or the bar from which it originated. Indeed, I quoted Paul as saying, “If I write about these and manage to make them boring, then I have done an incredible disservice. So I feel an incredible obligation not only to the drinks themselves, but to the bartenders who created them, and also to the heritage of cocktail writing to try to elevate it.”

There’s a lot to like in Paul’s new book, but what stands out the most is how accessible it is. I enjoy reading a lot of the recent cocktail books, but they’re often not the sort that I can casually flip through to find a new drink to make. The Cocktail Chronicles features more than 200 recipes. While they’re not basic, they use bottles of spirits and bitters that any enthusiastic cocktail drinker is likely to have on hand or be able to easily acquire. They rarely call for much homemade preparation, esoteric liqueurs, or overly specific identification of brands. It’s the kind of book that works as both a guide to standards of the modern cocktail renaissance and as a jumping off point for discovering overlooked drinks.

Skipping through the book, one of these for me was the Savoy Tango. I was recently sent a new bottle of sloe gin from Spirit Works Distillery in Sebastopol, California. (Sample bottles seemed to show up with more frequency in the golden age of blogging.) When I started writing about cocktails, good sloe gin made with real sloe berries was impossible to find. Cocktail bloggers would have been ecstatic to try it. Just a few years later, we enjoy an embarrassment of riches when it comes to well-made spirits. This is a really nice sloe gin, with a bright fruit and acidity, and I wanted to find a new cocktail in which to take it for a spin. Thankfully The Cocktail Chronicles features two sloe gin cocktails, neither of which I’d encountered before. The Savoy Tango, from the Savoy Cocktail Book, particularly caught my eye:

With just two ingredients and no garnish, this sure doesn’t sound like much. But it’s a surprisingly good drink, the kind one could easily pass over unless a trusted guide recommended it. That’s exactly the sort of cocktail one finds in Paul’s book, which is full of these accessible and delicious recipes. The book doesn’t get too deep into history, technique, or rare ingredients, but it’s perfect for finding easy-to-make drinks that stand the test of time, along with just enough background and instruction to introduce them. For readers looking for one book to guide them through the new standards of the cocktail renaissance, The Cocktail Chronicles is the one I’d recommend. Cheers, Paul.

(And thanks also to Fred for hosting and keeping Mixology Monday alive. I’ll try to be on deadline next time around.)

Inspiration for cocktails can come from strange places. This week it came from Jenny Lewis’ fantastic concert at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom, where she played a new song with the title “Red Bull and Hennessy.” Not a good cocktail, she noted. “Don’t drink that.” But she also threw down a challenge. This being Portland, there had to be a fancy mixologist in the house who could make Hennessy and Red Bull taste good. The friend I was with insisted — demanded! — that I take a shot at making this happen.

I didn’t have either one of these ingredients on hand, but after a quick stop at 7-Eleven and the dodgy neighborhood liquor store, I was in business. Before this I had only a vague idea of what Red Bull tasted like. It was actually better than I remembered, with some pleasantly fruity notes, bright citric acidity, and a touch of carbonation. Yeah, I could work with this!

The drink formats that came to mind were either a Paloma or a tropical swizzle. I ended up sort of combining the two, incorporating a little Combier pink grapefruit liqueur and serving over crushed ice. (Crushing the ice required the use, fittingly, of a Lewis bag.) Try this for a fancy Red Bull and Hennessy:

I usually ignore the endless number of marketing holidays that exist only to give PR people a hook for their press releases, but I’ll make an exception this morning for National Rum Day. That’s partially because I work in the rum business with El Dorado, partially because I’ve had this photo and recipe sitting in my post queue for months.

This is a cocktail I created a few years ago as part of a consulting gig for the Perfect Drink app. A few months before meeting the entrepreneurs behind the app I’d written an April Fool’s post about why bartenders should start weighing their drinks by the gram instead of relying on jiggers. Soon after I was recruited to work on a project to do exactly that. I was skeptical at first, but I was won over to how such a device could be useful in the right environment (home entertaining, for example).

The first retailer for the device was Brookstone, so we wanted to have a namesake cocktail for them. The company is based in Vermont, which suggested maple syrup as an ingredient. Hence this maple Daiquiri, a dark, rich take on the drink:

Berliner weisse mit schuss. (Photo by David L. Reamer from Cocktails on Tap.)

The first half of my book on beer cocktails features on vintage recipes, drinks created before the modern rebirth of cocktail culture. My book proposal tilted much more heavily toward contemporary cocktails, but as I researched older sources, it became clear that beer’s use in mixed drinks had a richer history than I’d imagined. Most of these come from English and American sources, no doubt in part because those are the sources I’m able to read.

I did try to find drinks from other countries though. A couple from Germany made the cut. Despite the Reinheitsgebot, or beer purity law, Germans aren’t too averse to corrupting their beers with spirits, juices, and syrups. The most widely known German mixed beer drink is the Radler, combining beer and citrus, and currently enjoying popularity in America in various pre-mixed forms (with varying levels of success).

Somewhat lesser known is the tradition of mixing with Berliner weisse, the lightly tart wheat beer originating in Berlin. Up until a few years ago, the style was nearly extinct. It too has enjoyed a revival, both in Germany and in the US. (Read Evan Rail for a closer look at its history.)

Good Berliner weisse is delicious on its own, but it’s often served with additions of spirits or syrups to sweeten it. To enjoy the beer mit schuss, add himbeer (raspberry) or waldmeister (woodruff) syrup. For a stiffer drink, have it mit strippe, with a shot of korn or kummel.

This Friday we’ll be serving both of these variants at the excellent Portland German beer bar Stammtisch. We’ll have Professor Fritz Briem 1809 Berliner Weisse on draft, with options for mit schuss with the locally made B. G. Reynolds’ woodruff syrup and mit strippe with the excellent Combier kummel. I’ll also be there selling and signing copies of my book, Cocktails on Tap, which features the drinks. If you’re in Portland, join us from 5-8. Not in Portland? You can buy my book and a commercial version of woodruff syrup online.

The Craft Brewers Conference is taking place in Portland this week, so the city is overrun with brewers and more great beer events than anyone could possibly attend. We were lucky to host one of these at The Multnomah Whiskey Library with Widmer Brewing, who asked us to come up with a few cocktails using their beers.

This Imperial Old Fashioned is my favorite of the ones Michael Lorberbaum and I came up with for the evening. It’s a bit over the top with Clear Creek’s peated single malt whiskey and a 2-inch, crystal clear ice cube laser-etched with the Widmer logo. To sweeten it, we made a syrup with cane sugar and Widmer’s KBG Russian Imperial Stout, which has dark, roasted malt notes that complement the smokiness of the whiskey. (For a similar idea using genever and rauchbier, see Katie Stipe’s Vandaag Gin Cocktail in Cocktails on Tap).

Stir over ice and pour into a rocks glass with a big ice cube (laser etching optional). Garnish with the grapefruit peel.

For the stout syrup:

1 22 oz bottle KGB Russian Imperial Stout
44 oz cane sugar

Combine in a pan and stir over low to medium heat until the sugar is dissolved, taking care that it doesn’t spill over. Let cool and skim any foam, then bottle and refrigerate. You should feel free to scale down the recipe and drink the remaining beer.

One of the frustrations of writing a cocktail book, rather than a continuously updated blog, is the long interval between writing and publication. In the time between sending the book to the printer and seeing it arrive on store shelves, you’re bound to come across drinks you wish you’d been able to include. And with Cocktails on Tap coming out tomorrow, I’m sure this process will only accelerate as I hear from bartenders and cocktails enthusiasts about their favorite beer cocktails.

This post is devoted to one of these that I’d love to go back in time and slip into the manuscript. My friend and colleague at the Multnomah Whiskey Library, Jordan Felix, introduced me to it, and it was a popular cocktail on the menu there this winter.

The “Hangman’s Blood” is a cocktail that reportedly first appeared in Richard Hughes’ 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica. From Wikipedia:

Hangman’s blood… is compounded of rum, gin, brandy, and porter… Innocent (merely beery) as it looks, refreshing as it tastes, it has the property of increasing rather than allaying thirst, and so once it has made a breach, soon demolishes the whole fort.

In the 1960s, novelist Antony Burgess offered an even more potent recipe to The Guardian:

Into a pint glass doubles of the following are poured: gin, whisky, rum, port, and brandy. A small bottle of stout is added, and the whole topped up with champagne or champagne surrogate. It tastes very smooth, induces a somehow metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover… I recommend this for a quick, though expensive, lift.

“This is a highly dangerous mixture and consumption is not advised,” warns The Burgess Foundation, who “takes no responsibility for illness or injury caused by following this or any other recipe by Anthony Burgess.” A fair warning.

Let’s be honest. Both of these drinks sound abominable. But part of the fun of exploring old cocktail recipes, especially those with a literary pedigree, is reviving them with better balance. Jordan’s Hangman’s Bier is a much simplified take on the drink, with lime and demerara standing in for funky Jamaican rum, and this version is a lot less likely to leave the imbiber awakening the next morning feeling like he’s been worked over by a gang of droogs.

When planning the menu for our Nordic Night dinner at Fenrir, I had one spot left to fill in which I knew I wanted to feature the Krogstad Gamle aquavit. I tried out a bunch of ideas, but none of them were coming together quite right. Worse yet, I was running out of aquavit. I needed an idea soon!

As I often do in such situations, I turned to The Flavor Bible, an indispensable guide to flavor pairings that work. Reading the pairings for the strong anise note in Krogstad, nutty flavors kept coming up. That got me thinking about amaretto, which got me thinking about The Best Amaretto Sour in the World™.

That drink comes from my fellow Portland bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler, who combines amaretto with cask-proof bourbon. It’s an awesome cocktail. With a few adjustments, could it work with a barrel aged aquavit? The answer was yes, the drink worked on the first try, and I didn’t have to devote any more of the non-existent Aquavit Week budget to yet another purchase. In a nod to Jeff, our Nordic Night humbly offered The Second-Best Amaretto Sour in the World.

The Caipirinha — a simple, rustic combination of muddled limes, sugar, and cachaca — is one of the world’s most popular cocktails. It’s also one of the easiest to prepare, tolerant of some imprecision in measurement and requiring no straining whatsoever. Just muddle the limes and sugar, add cachaca and ice, shake, and pour the whole thing into a glass. A basic recipe:

That’s pretty easy. To make it even easier, Novo Fogo Cachaca recently introduced a new Caipirinha Kit containing a bottle of their silver cachaca, a nice wooden muddler, and two mason jars in which to make and serve the cocktails. The jars eliminate the need for even having a cocktail shaker; shake everything in the jar, pop the lid, and drink. It’s so easy, even a pug can do it.

Well, almost.

Since I work with Novo Fogo, they sent me a few of the kits to play around with and try out in some seasonal variations. Another great thing about the Caipirinha is that it’s incredibly versatile. The simple base of sugar, lime, and cachaca lends itself to lots of possibilities, pairing nicely with fresh fruit, herbs, and other spirits. I took the kit out to a few parties to see what we could come up with.

First up was meeting with my friends Tom, Kristen, and Porter the Pug. Taking advantage of end of summer Oregon produce, we hit the backyard with a bunch of berries. A couple combinations that worked: A Caipirinha with huckleberries and basil, and another with blueberries and St. Germain. In both drinks a handful of fruit was muddled along with the lime and sugar, then everything shaken together.

The next stop was a picnic with the Portland Culinary Alliance at Goschie Hop Farms in Silverton, Oregon. This was right at the beginning of fresh hop season, so hops were everywhere. As you can imagine, the place smelled amazing. (Yes, that’s an entire room filled with hops.)

This gave me the idea of making a fresh hop Caipirinha. The Caip-beer-inha, a Caipirinha topped with a splash of IPA, is a cocktail Ezra Johnson-Greenough and I have served many times, so this seemed like it could work. It turns out that muddling hops doesn’t actually extract a ton of flavor, although the drink was nice enough. A fresh hop cone does make a killer garnish though. When they’re in season, I could imagine using them to decorate a Caip-beer-inha.

Finally, at a cocktail fundraiser event at Fish Sauce, Tommy Klus, Will Ray, and I dialed in a Caipirinha made with kummel, a liqueur flavored with caraway and other savory herbs, proving that Caipirinhas really can work with just about anything. This one had cachaca, lime, sugar, kummel, and Angostura bitters, and was surprisingly tasty. (Recipe coming soon; the photo above is our old-style mason jar.)

The Caipirinha Kits are already available in a few states, including Oregon, with many more on the way.

Trigger Warning: This cocktail may produce discomfort in those who have a low tolerance for capsaicin, perceive cilantro as a soapy flavor, suffer from a real or imagined gluten sensitivity, are in a state of shock over the price of limes, or believe that putting beer in a cocktail will lead only to discord. All others may find it refreshing and enjoyable.

I’ve been too wrapped up in book duties to post many cocktails lately, but now that that’s mostly complete I’m back to blogging and tending bar. My next stop takes me back to my old home of Washington, DC where I’ll be guest bartending at Cafe Saint-Ex on Tuesday with Franklin Jones of The Gibson! We have a menu of Novo Fogo cachaça cocktails ready for our Bars on Fire event, happening 5-8 pm. Here’s a preview of one them, the Corrida de Cavalos. It wasn’t made with horse racing in mind, but the use of mint and the timing of the Kentucky Derby is such a nice coincidence that I’ll pretend it was intentional.

Cocktail blogging has been slow here as I’m currently on break from working in bars and restaurants to focus on writing my beer cocktail book. It now has a publisher and will be coming out early next year from Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, with photography by the extremely talented David L. Reamer. We’ve completed about half the shots at this point and I can tell you already that the drinks are going to look fantastic.

That means I’m not doing much drink creation at the moment, but here’s one from a while back that I’ve been meaning to post. I got the idea of doing a coffee-infused amaro from Matthew Biancaniello in Los Angeles. I made an infusion of Stumptown Hairbender espresso beans and Ramazzotti amaro, then played around with it in several cocktails that I was never quite happy with. The infusion itself was delicious though, so I ended up just putting it on a big ice cube with a lemon twist. Sometimes easiest is best.

This drink started out on the Metrovino brunch menu, then migrated to the after dinner menu, and finally made it over to The Hop and Vine. I don’t think it’s available anywhere right now, but it’s simple to make at home.

8 oz Ramazzotti
10 grams coffee beans

Lightly muddle the coffee beans to crack (but not pulverize) them. Seal in a glass jar with Ramazzotti. Infuse for 24 hours, strain, and bottle. If you want to make more, just scale the recipe upward.

To serve, pour two ounces in a glass with a big rock and express a lemon peel over the drink. Garnish with the peel.

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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, bartender, cocktail consultant, and magician in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Cocktails on Tap: The Art of Mixing Spirits and Beer. His articles have appeared in the print or online editions of The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Times, Reason, The Oregonian, Eater, and other publications. [Photo by Michael Ingram.]Image Source:kissmiss